School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Larrikins, Listeners and Lifeline: inside Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club
    Knowles, Matilda ( 2022)
    Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club (2010 – present) is a loosely structured weekly podcast hosted by two stand-up comedians and good mates Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler. Each episode usually features one to three guests, often also stand-up comedians, who casually chat with Chandler and Dassalo and joke about their lives and the world around them. In this thesis I establish how hosts, guests and listeners of comedy chatcasts co-create their performance conventions by collaboratively and often unwittingly combining a range of social norms, stand-up comedy techniques and conversational skills. Understanding how these conventions are created and shared shows how comedy chatcasts influence host and listener behaviour in podcast-related spaces and in their broader lives. As I demonstrate, comedy chatcasts have influence even when the intention of the hosts and guests is only to be funny. The comedians in The Little Dum Dum Club are always looking for the joke, and the humour is often insult-based and puerile. These are contemporary larrikin performances, involving taking the piss out of one another, themselves and authority in an egalitarian way, a shared self-deprecation that also encompasses a sense of mateship. Rather than uncritically reiterating these dominant conventions of white Australian masculinity, however, the comedic performances in the podcast both represent and critique them. The performance conventions of comedy chatcasts create a “safe space” in which comedians can humorously explore ideas and respond to changing cultural norms in a way that does not radically reshape them but does suggest opportunities for intervention and evolution. The impact of this is clear, for instance, in the meaningful but humorous discussions of suicidality on the podcast and how joking about lived experience reframes flippant suicide jokes to lessen shame and promote help-seeking behaviour among listeners and comedians. Listeners likewise have a set of conventions which enable them to perform their fandom of the comedy chatcast. Building on podcast scholarship about intimacy and parasocial relationships, I show how listeners attempt to replicate the mateship form of friendship performed on the podcast using its jokingly abusive comedy style. For listeners of The Little Dum Dum Club, successfully performing their listenership requires navigating a series of at times conflicting conventions which are often at odds with broader norms of appropriateness and do not necessarily find a willing audience. Podcasts have niche global audiences and conventions need to be interpreted and performed to receptive audiences in order to be successful. The Little Dum Dum Club is unique in its content, but not in its construction. This thesis shows how comedy chatcasts as new media enable analysis of the shifts in and discussions of our cultural norms that happen in non-radical, flexible and playful ways. Through such analysis, we can see how comedy chatcasts can be influential in minor and major ways for those involved.